Friday, September 25, 2015

Friday's Forgotten Books, Friday, September 25, 2015

Next week we will feature some reviews of the work of Ed McBain. Feel free to jump in with one. Send it to me if you don't have a blog. Or post it on Facebook. Let's do him proud.

From the archives

Al Tucher is the author of many stories about the delightful Diana. You can find him here.

LONESOME ROAD

By George Harsh.

Since
1986 I have worked as a cataloger at the Newark Public Library, which
has existed since 1883. The library has some very deep collections, and
exploring them is both my job and a perk of my job. A recent project
in the biography section brought me into contact with Lonesome Road, a 1971 memoir by George Harsh.

In
1928 Harsh was a rich, arrogant, idle young college student in
Georgia. He and other rich, arrogant, idle young men spent much of their
time discussing their superiority over the masses and the uses to
which they should put that superiority. This was only four years after
the Leopold and Loeb case, but it seems part of the “superman”
pathology to dismiss possible lessons from anyone else’s experience.
The young men in Harsh’s circle decided that they were able and
therefore obligated to commit the perfect crime.

For
the thrill of it they began a string of armed robberies. When a store
clerk resisted, Harsh was the one holding the gun and the one who fired
the lethal shot.

The police easily caught
the young supermen, and Harsh was sentenced to death. His codefendants
received life sentences, and the prosecutor, troubled by the disparity,
succeeded in having Harsh’s sentence commuted to life. Writing years
later, Harsh is unsparing toward his young self. He deserved to hang,
he says, but he received more mercy than he had shown with the gun in
his hand.

He spent the next several years on
a Georgia chain gang that was brutal even by the standards of the time
and place. Eventually, he became a trusty with a job as an orderly in a
prison hospital.

Here we encounter the
first of several plot twists that only reality can get away with
writing. When an inmate needed an emergency appendectomy, a freak ice
storm kept the staff physicians from reaching the hospital. Harsh, who
had assisted at several such operations, performed the surgery and
saved the man’s life. The governor of Georgia pardoned him.

The
year was 1940. George Harsh felt undeserving of peace and security
while so much of the world was at war. He traveled north and joined the
Royal Canadian Air Force. Harsh flew numerous bombing missions over
Germany. His luck ran out in 1942, when he was shot down. His captors
sent him to Stalag Luft III.

Fiction writers, try getting away with that one. In the 1963 film The Great Escape, the
character called Intelligence, played by Gordon Jackson, is based on
Harsh. He was not one of the 80-plus POWs who made it through the tunnel
before it was discovered, which was just as well. Only a handful made
it to safety. The rest were recaptured, and the Gestapo summarily
executed more than fifty of them.

His
story does not. In 1945 he was in his mid-thirties and had spent mere
days as a grown man neither incarcerated nor at war. In another twist
that in its own way might be the strangest of all, he worked for a
while as a publisher’s traveling sales representative. The experiment
in freedom was not a success. The memory of his crime tormented him,
and he attempted suicide. Later he suffered a stroke, and in 1980 he
died.

No collaborator in the writing of this
book is named. If it is Harsh’s work, it counts as a remarkable
achievement. He knows when and how to make his writing as terse and
urgent as Morse code in the night, and his meditations on freedom,
imprisonment, violence and war come with a hard-earned authority.

Did
George Harsh atone for his crime? It’s a tough call that will vary
from reader to reader. Does his book deserve a place on the shelf? In
my mind, beyond all doubt.

I actually have one this week. A title that has been covered by several other FFB participants, The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, http://booksareforsquares.blogspot.com/2015/08/listened-to-thirty-nine-steps-by-john.html

About Me

Patricia Abbott is the author of more than 125 stories that have appeared online, in print journals and in various anthologies. She is the author of two print novels CONCRETE ANGEL (2015) and SHOT IN DETROIT (2016)(Polis Books). CONCRETE ANGEL was nominated for an Anthony and Macavity Award in 2016. SHOT IN DETROIT was nominated for an Edgar Award and an Anthony Award in 2017. A collection of her stories I BRING SORROW AND OTHER STORIES OF TRANSGRESSION will appear in 2018.